He shrugged again. ‘No odds to me.’

Since that time he hadn’t troubled her again, although when the weather had been bad and he hadn’t been able to get into town for a while she was aware of him watching her when he didn’t think she knew and often he would be rubbing himself, his loose-lipped mouth working and his beady eyes half-closed. She had made up her mind that when Betsy was a little older she would leave Mill House and try and find a job elsewhere, and to that end she had saved every penny of her wage – when Arthur saw fit to pay her. His stock excuse was that business was poor although she didn’t altogether believe this. But in the meantime she and Betsy were living in a lovely house and Betsy was growing up healthy and well with fresh country air to breathe and wanting for nothing. Arthur had agreed that she could cut down some of his mother’s old clothes to make little dresses and other things the child needed as she grew – in lieu of a few weeks’ wages, though. He did nothing for free.

Arthur went into town once a week with the cart loaded with sacks of flour, some of them seconds, and he never came back without having sold it all from what she could make out. The horse and cart had to pass the house before it reached the mill and on numerous occasions she had made it her business to look down on it from an upstairs window. When she had challenged him about it he’d insisted he took fewer sacks into town than he’d used to and had to charge a reduced price. He made a great show of coming into the kitchen on market day and counting out his supposed takings minus any food he’d bought for the week, but she suspected he’d got another cash box hidden somewhere in the mill where he deposited the bulk of his earnings. He resented paying her the wage they’d agreed that first afternoon eighteen months ago, she knew that, and he often dropped little hints that she should be grateful for having a roof over her head and enough food to eat. And she was grateful, but more for the fact that hidden away as she and Betsy were there was little chance of Nathaniel finding them, especially under her false name.

But now it was the height of summer and Betsy had had her second birthday a month ago. The occasion had been bitter-sweet for Rose. On the one hand she delighted in the fact that her child was as bright as a button and developing as she should; on the other she grieved that Davey would never see these milestones and how beautiful his daughter was. Betsy had her chestnut hair but Davey’s brown eyes, and she was enchanting.